


Small Crimes

by withthepilot



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-30
Updated: 2010-12-30
Packaged: 2017-10-14 05:49:41
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/146056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/withthepilot/pseuds/withthepilot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Leave me out with the waste / This is not what I do / It's the wrong kind of place / To be thinking of you / It's the wrong time / For somebody new / It's a small crime / And I've got no excuse"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Small Crimes

It’s one of those days when she wakes up wishing she’d never demanded reassignment, detached from her own body as she spreads her limbs on the cool, wrinkled sheets of the dorm bed. She imagines the weightlessness of space, familiar yet completely out of control—pushed out of an airlock, split into neat pieces by the force of an explosion.

She probably knows at least a hundred ways to say _guilt_ , but none sound guttural enough for the way she feels; none match the grip of this charred, black thing that wraps itself around her core and squeezes until tears spill over her cheeks, rendering her a twisted, wrung-out dishrag.

Which cadet did she push out of his or her chair? Whose name did she delete?

“Easy, darlin’,” the kind voice says now. It’s a fuzzy picture at best: careful hands taking her by her delicate elbows and lifting her from the ground in the alley outside the bar. But the voice—she knows that voice. It’s something she can cling to, something she can parse and make sense of. Her fingertips find dark stubble and she tries to read it, like a message in ancient Braille from an older, simpler world.

Before space. Before this new, cold danger.

“This isn’t what I do,” she mumbles, so close that the heat threatens to melt her from the inside out. His hands move over her sides, linger on her hips, skinned knees marred by small, stinging pebbles. This isn’t her leaning on a man, pressing her mouth to whiskey-soaked lips. It’s not her asking for help.

Or maybe it is: Nyota Uhura, grabbing hold of a man and taking what she wants. And so lucky, because he always wants her, too.

“Things are different now,” the doctor says, as if he can understand. “ _We’re_ different. This, darlin’...? It’s a small crime.”

She tries to smile for him, twisting broken doll parts to slide a leg between his, pull him closer. Of all her crimes, this won’t nearly be the worst. She just adds it to the list.


End file.
